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NC/VA/MD - Fred Howard Coffey, Jr, Child Killer/Rapist, 1970's-80's

I ran across this guy while on another thread.
It should be for NC/VA/MD but I didn't know how to put it in.

Fred Howard Coffey, Jr. is currently serving a life term in NC for the 1979 murder of a 10 year NC girl. He may have been involved in the Lyon Sisters abduction, and possibly in the 24 July 1975 abduction/murder of 15 year-old Kathy Lynn Beatty, also of Montgomery County, Maryland.

He is a prime suspect in numerous other murder cases, including 8 yr old boy Travis King in VA (1986) and 5 yr old girl Neely Smith in NC (1981).

Coffey currently resides in Pender Prison, NC. He comes up for Parole every year in July.

This guy is the worst of the worst. I've never understood why LE was unable to charge him in Travis King's murder. Several eyewitnesses saw him walking with the boy. When he showed up in the neighborhood after Travis was found dead, a neighbor took down the license number of his car.

“He bounced around his whole life. And wherever he was, kids ended up dead,” said Bristol Virginia Police Sgt. Steve Crawford, part of the third generation of detectives to inherit the case.
Fred Howard Coffey, 66, is in prison six hours away for murdering a 10-year-old North Carolina girl seven years before Shane was killed. Coffey is suspected of killing others – maybe one little girl, maybe more – and reportedly confessed to molesting 100 kids.

A lanky gray-haired man pulled his Pontiac Sunbird into the Eastridge Apartments parking lot on the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 21, 1986. A woman leaving for work watched as he got out, opened the trunk and removed a metal detector. She thought it was odd.

About 3 p.m., Shane King was sitting in a recliner watching cartoons at his family’s apartment in the C building. His grandmother needed a part for her car so she and her daughter, Shane’s mother, Terry King, left for the store. It was hot and Shane didn’t want to go with them, Miller said. He’d been sick; his mother made him goulash and they left him alone with the door unlocked. Two hours later, when the women came home, the door was locked but the boy was gone.

“He was such a good boy,” a neighbor told the Herald Courier. “He was the first little boy I knew who washed clothes and folded clothes. An 8-year-old boy that would do something like that.”

I am related to Neely Smith by marriage and it's so obvious Fred Coffey murdered her I wish he would be charged with it! This man makes me sick! He is definitely the worst if the worst!

I am so sorry that no justice has been done for Neely. It must be so heartbreaking to live with the horrific death of a small child while knowing that her killer is still alive and kicking and seeking parole every year. Prayers to you and Neely's family.

Have the LE ever found any evidence linking him to her or is it based on suspicion only?